[graph]

Overall, vehicle fuel expenses rose 17.3%, again leading the growth in expenses. In comparison, salaries, wages and benefits increased 8.6%, while all other operating expenses (+0.2%) were little changed. The increase in fuel expenses was driven by higher prices, as carriers reported a 1.4% increase in fuel consumption.

[graph]

During the first two quarters of 2011, trucking firms reported year-over-year declines in operating profits averaging 8%, as expenses outgrew revenue in both quarters. The situation reversed in the final two quarters, such that profits averaged increases of 10%.

[graph]

Trucking firms reported increases in fuel expenses averaging 18% in 2010 and 2011. Accordingly, the contribution of fuel expenses to total expenses rose from 17% during the first quarter of 2009 to over 21% in the fourth quarter of 2011.

[graph]

“The Search for Insight” is a dynamic poem made of bits of tossed-together plundered text. This is a poem with many authors – more than we know, more than we can name here; it is possible that you are one of them. From each fragment we have selected a word, and those words have been charted on a delightful little tool called Google Insights, which tracks the number of searches each term has received on the Google search engine. The results determine the arrangement, but they go out of date rather quickly. The poem will therefore change periodically to adjust to the new information, and every week we will add more material to the pot, and more words to our search.

– Jeremy Colangelo

ROUND 1 – POETRY
from “In a Station of the Metro” by Ezra Pound

ROUND 2 – NONFICTION
from Statistics Canada’s The Daily, April 3, 2012
Quarterly Trucking Survey , fourth quarter 2011

When we realized this day was coming, we did what any reasonable, fun, level-headed group of four-year-olds would do: sat ourselves down on our kitchen floor with a two-four of beer and started talking – very seriously, and a lot – about ourselves.

We went over all the important stuff: what we’d wanted to do when we started IQ, where we felt we were now, what we wanted to be in the future, and what kind of snacks we wanted to have at our party. And we ended up figuring some stuff out.

Basically, our goal since day one has been to make our own mandate – “publishing the unpublishable” – less confusing. We’ve sought out stories, poems, music and art that might not have a chance in other publications, and tried to put together issues that show how this stuff might actually be worth your time and attention.

Our size and shape has changed in certain ways since our first issue, but our main goal – to provide a good home for misfit literature of all kinds – has stayed the same. So for our birthday, we wanted to try out some new stuff that made use of our new abilities, but also stuck close to that original mandate.

Everything in this issue of IQ is designed to grow over time. All of the projects you see when you click through this issue are going to change based on who’s reading or playing or submitting to or googling for them. Each project builds on the themes we’ve been working with since the magazine’s inception; they’re all new, strange, weird, fun, and probably wouldn’t be able to fit in anywhere else.

Like what?

Well, like: We’ve got a video game that generates its own poetry section; poems and found texts rewritten by google; a twitter-based (not –sized!) fiction section; and the beginnings of a video archive which will feature original and rare recordings from our previous contributors. Plus, we’ve got a new call for submissions to our fifth issue, featuring guest editors Nikki Reimer and Alex Leslie.

This is our fourth issue; not much has changed since our first, except everything.

We hope you like it. Thank you so much for reading.

Love,

IQ

« Play Now! »
‹ Leaderboards ›

• Compatibility: Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 9+
• Languages: HTML5, Javascript
• Size: 140KB, 2900 Lines of Code

• From IQ:
  • Raise High The Roof Beam, Orthidontistry, by Mat Laporte
  • brain waves, thunder storms & brain damage, rain damage by Robert Swereda
  • Q&, by Adam Parish
  • The Diviners, by Margaret Laurence, 1967, by Stephen Kempster Whelpdale Thomas
  • Definite Pitch, by Marc Boudignon
  • Pressing Matter, by Janelle Weed
  • The Egg, by Caleb JW Brasset
  • Fiction, Incongruou$ly, by Pasha Malla
  • Buds, by Stephen Kempster Whelpdale Thomas
  • Comic Sans, by Michael Hingston
  • Loose Change, by Lindsay Tipping
  • Still Life, With Wreckage, by Paulo Campos
  • The Canadian Civil War, by David Brock
  • Canadian Literature, by Brian Evenson
  • The Security Wall, by Dr. Gabor MatÈ
  • Tiger Woods, by David Shields
• Other Texts:
  • Clockfire, by Jonathan Ball
  • Ex Machina, by Jonathan Ball
  • Colourful Timulton, by Morroque
  • Diskmaster, by Morroque
  • Matchette Road, by Morroque
  • y, by Morroque
  • Igness, by Diddgery
  • The English Language, by Diddgery & Morroque
  • Pasta Recipes for Ducks and Depressed Teenagers, by Albatorss 11
  • Traveller, by Jaabi Taylor
  • Our Internet Wellbeing, by Jaabi Taylor
• Plus three others.
• Can you unlock them?

• Click on the screen, or type ~ to bring up the ingame pause menu.
• Need a challenge? Try out some of the more difficult modes like Lipogram and Oulipo! You may earn up to 70% more points for playing on a more difficult mode!
• Anagrams usually play for 30% more points, but if you get a really difficult one, you could play for 90%!
• Play with your friends! Click on “Compete against this poem!” to challenge the same level that another poem uses!

Our past issues have been centred around simple themes; we’ve tried, since our first issue, to explore all the different ways a thing might be “unpublishable” and the ways an unpublishable work could still be good – to make our mandate less confusing than commonsense, to be the logical extension of what’s already out there in the world of literary publications. We’ve done (or tried to do) this with music, science, with strange or straight or second-placed works of all kinds.

But what we haven’t done so much – at least not until now – is to explore what we can do as an online magazine that we haven’t done yet; how our format might be

Online-ness has always been intrinsic part of IQ – if we weren’t an Internet Magazine, we wouldn’t be able to publish long poems, images or mp3s; we’d be hemmed in by a whole bunch of constraints that we don’t have out here in the vast, lawless world of cyber-stuff. (That’s a cool way of putting that, right? We’re cool?)

Actually, coolness is where things start to get tricky. Often, attempts to fit The Internet into Literature or vice-versa feel awkward, forced; square-peg-round-hole stuff, outdated or uncomfortable. We can build better ways to read what used to be paper-things on our non-paper devices, but a lot of stuff beyond that comes off feeling forced or useless. There’s a good chance that if you’re reading this you own at least one or two devices that deliver new reading material – things that are both mundane and “literary” – to you on a daily (hourly?) basis, wherever and whenever you like. In that sense, it seems kind of useless to inquire into or try to mess around with the relationship between literature and technology, or literature and the internet, because there are already large parts of our everyday experience as readers where text and technology are seamlessly integrated – where we don’t even notice that anymore, because we don’t really need to. Nobody’s particularly impressed or shocked by an e-reader anymore; we read essays and stories and articles filled with links to other texts, subjects and media on a daily basis without even blinking.

So It seems kind of deeply uncool to continue asking after this stuff when most of us are, at the very least, used to it.

But we here at IQ, as you may have already noticed, have never been particularly good at being cool. And while we’ve never really been that interested in trying to make ourselves look or feel like a paper magazine, we’ve also never really done any serious messing around with our format or exploration of what we can do with our Internet-Magazine-ness.

As an online magazine, we want not just to publish good content, but to explore and investigate ways of bringing technology and online communication together with literary content in ways that aren’t forced or awkward or (worst) boring, but actually fun and weird and interesting and engaging. Instead of just making IQ look like a print magazine, or featuring work that sacrifices literary quality for surface-level gimmickiness, we want to find and publish work that truly couldn’t be published anywhere else. This goes, of course, for every issue we’ve published so far, but especially for this one; we wanted to see if there was anything else we could be doing, as an online publication, that we weren’t already.

What we’ve ended up with are the foundations of a few projects that we hope will grow and change along with the magazine itself. We’ve got a game where players write poetry based on various constraints; twitter-based (not –sized) fiction;  literary and nonliterary texts rewritten by google; and the beginnings of a video archive which will update regularly with exclusive or rare audio and video from previous IQ contributors. We’re also resurrecting our elephant-graveyard of a blog; we’ll be regularly posting regular features on all kinds of unpublishable topics from now on, starting with this interview with contributor MW.

In our next few issues we’ll be returning to our usual structure – poetry and fiction sections, plus one or two special projects per issue. This one’s different, but what we’re hoping is that you’ll see something different here; that maybe you’ll pick some new patterns out from the signal-noise, that we can mess with your ideas about what poetry and fiction on the internet can be, if only for a few minutes. Or that we can get you to watch a video of our poetry editor eating a popsicle in a hot tub.

As always, thank you so much for reading. We hope you like it.

Love,

IQ

Submissions to this series are still open until Nov. 1st.]

–

The cement trough yawns, an abyss filled with streaming sewage hundreds of feet below. The smell is pungent as wastewater from streams and rivers mixes with household waste to create a haven for the bacterium that is my nemesis: Chlamydia.

“You know what’s in the sewage?” asks the beefy engineer at the Woodward Avenue water purification plant in Hamilton, a small city in Ontario once famous for its steel. These days, it is more known for its non-achievements: steel mill layoffs; Ti-Cats football fans who shout “Oskie-Wee-Wee! Oskie-Wa-Wa! Holy mackinaw! Tigers…ha! Ha! Ha!” even as their team repeatedly loses; and an underdeveloped downtown core with an overdeveloped pigeon problem.

But Hamilton is also a city of waterfalls and streams, rivers and harbors, all a natural home for Chlamydia. As, of course, is sewage.

“Corn,” the engineer answers himself. “Corn doesn’t get digested. It passes through the intestine intact.”

He hands me five litres of waste water.

Under a darkening sky, I drive back to my research laboratory at the McMaster University hospital and lug the jugs of water upstairs, past the red zone where just-born infants rest peacefully in plastic incubator cages, under individual yellow bulbs.

Rather like plants.

Children are at great risk of infection by Chlamydophila pneumoniae, which causes pneumonia. Its infamous cousin Chlamydia trachomatis causes the sexually transmitted disease Chlamydia, which can result in blindness. Prachlamydia and Simkania cause respiratory illness. Waddlia causes abortion in cows.

I run through the list, memorized for my upcoming thesis defense. The next sentence in the presentation goes so:

New species of the bacterium are still being found, in places as far-flung and extreme as Antarctic salinity lakes. Wherever they are found, they are pathogenic. And yet, their presence in our environment, in our water sources — rivers, ponds, and lakes — has been largely ignored.

My job is to figure out a way to detect them that lab technicians can employ easily; an amazingly difficult task, I’ve found out over the past four months. I have trudged through forests and swamps and man-made reservoirs located next to deserted hiking trails and country roads and highways. I have watched the Red Hill Expressway, intended to cut travel time between Hamilton and Toronto in half, grow from a muddy road to a cement monster, all the while collecting water from the Red Hill Creek. The different water sources each have distinctive fauna and flora that comes to life under a microscope.

A single drop of water is a universe unto itself, inhabited by creatures of reduced proportions. Magical shapes drift in and out under 40 times magnification — translucent amoebas, paramecia, rotifers, sun animalcules (“little animal”) with hair-like flagellum around them like a halo, and other strangely beautiful blobs. These are the visible creatures.

My target is the inhabitant of a world of less than a single micrometer — invisible.

Invisible is how I feel as I pass into the purple zone of the hospital. Fluorescent bulbs cast shadows in the deserted hallway. Graduate students have fled their labs to quell their boredom with alcoholic beverages. I am alone in my quest for what I have come to view as an ethereal creature. It exists, but has eluded me repeatedly. I do not know if this is because of human error, or because the water samples lack Chlamydia. I do not know which answer I would prefer.

So filtering sewage is what it comes down to.

–

Every day for the past four months I have performed the same set of experiments.

One. Collect sample. Spin sample in a centrifuge at 500 times the speed of gravity. This weighs down all the debris to be thrown away.

Two. Take the “soup” — the resulting sample — and filter using paper with pore size of 1000 micrometers under strong vacuum. This gets rid of the biggest microorganisms.

Three. Filter through a paper with one micrometer-sized pores. Now, only the smallest organisms – smaller than 0.000 001th the size of a centimeter – are left in the sample.

Four. Add phenol and chloroform, chemicals that will cause the beautiful, mysterious living blobs to burst open, spilling out their contents — DNA and RNA — into the sample.

Five. Amplify regions of DNA where the four bases — adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine — have come together in a sequence that, out of all the organisms in the world, are present only in the Chlamydial genome. The sequence is a signature as unique as a thumbprint, which, after many steps inside the nucleus of the bacterium, results in the “signature protein” CT429. No one knows the function of this protein, one of the thousands that allow these bacteria to grow and multiply and infect. A PCR machine is used for this.

Six. Amplify the sequence coding for Heat shock protein 70, a protein present in most organisms on Earth. It helps fold other proteins into shapes that must be painfully conserved for proper function. Misfolded proteins can result in disease — dementia and Lou Gherig’s, for example.

This is the so-called “control.” Experiments cannot proceed in science without a standard to show results are possible. That way, you can’t blame the machine when nothing comes out the other end.

Seven. Separate amplified DNA fragments according to size and charge.

If the heat shock protein gene (“control”) amplifies but the Chlamydia gene doesn’t, it means the sewage water contained organisms of many varieties, but not Chlamydia.

Or it could mean that there is a glitch in the filtration steps, or other parts of the experiment.

This uncertainty is ever present in the lab, I have found. Why did something not work? Or why did something work? Was the result an outlier? Could it be possible that the wrong protein got amplified in the PCR machine due to primer mismatch? Perhaps the AGTCCCT primer, instead of attaching to TCAGGGA, attached to a region of the DNA that goes TCATGGA. Now the wrong region is amplified, a size of 600 base pairs instead of the 400 base pairs that I am expecting. Nothing makes sense.

Or perhaps, serendipitously, the wrong region is also 400 base pairs long, creating the illusion of the perfect match. Voila! The protein is found! Chlamydia exists!

But clone the region into a vector and re-amplify. Sequence. The protein sequence is not the same as for CT429. The wrong protein got amplified. Chlamydia doesn’t exist.

–

I pour the sewage into 1000 ml centrifugation bottles. The lab vibrates as the ancient machine spins. I bounce slightly on my toes in rhythm with the rocking cultures of bacteria grown by my colleagues.

This is a world of objectivity, ruled by the twin gods of precision and accuracy. But like life itself, the world of experimentation has uncertainties, with results true to perhaps a 90th percentile of certainty, or even a 95th. There are no final answers. But there is the quest.

There are more of these pieces on the way, but if you enjoy this one even half as much as we did, then we have already achieved our goal.]

–

As an aging academic neurosurgeon I confront many emotionally draining life-and-death issues with patients, and intellectually challenging ones with peers and students. A few years ago I even studied as a mature student to achieve a masters of health science in bioethics, to help me grapple with some of the tough dilemmas I face every day. I learned from many great teachers and thinkers about the theological, philosophical, and legal hand-rails that exist to help guide us up and down the staircase of morality.

I was reintroduced to old friends like Kant, who possessed the courage and goodness to espouse that we should do the right thing out of a sense of obligation to do the right thing and for no other reason. And to Mill and others who appealed to the practical among us by espousing a utilitarian approach in which the most moral course of action is the one which produces the most desirable outcome for the greatest number of people. And who could leave Rawls out of this deliberation – he whose intense sense of justice and fairness and ingenious concept of the veil of ignorance literally brings a tear to my eye every time I think of it.

Of course we also have the good old principles of ethics to guide us as well – they are deliciously simplistic, something which appeals to a dumb brain surgeon like me.

But in spite of all this exposure to brilliant bioethical theory, principle, and practice, I have failed to unravel many of the mysteries surrounding life’s everyday problems. One which haunts me, as a surgeon and a Kantian, is the correct etiquette around flatulating (hereafter referred to as “farting”) in a closed space like the operating room (OR) where many people and their noses are within a confined physical space.

I’m a fairly flatulent guy, and like most men, I’m not shy about it – in fact I’m pretty proud of it. It subserves a necessary bodily function, but it is also inherently funny and always makes me laugh, no matter where I am or what I am doing. I have never encountered a single fart that wasn’t humorous. So I never shy away from an accusation that I have let one loose. For example, at home I never blame my dogs when one of my daughters fans her hand in disgust in front of her face, grimacing and glaring at me while uttering an irritated “Oh, daddy!” In fact I have even been known to take credit when one of my dogs farts – they don’t appear to mind me stealing their thunder.

But what is one to do when one needs to fart in the OR?

First, let us be clear: farting is not an optional activity which an ethical person could consciously and morally choose to avoid if she/he wished, in the same way an ethical person could avoid cheating, stealing, lying, or murdering. With that obvious but essential fact out in the open, let us proceed. I have thought hard about the various approaches one can take in the face of an impending fart, and as I see it there are finite options when a surgeon in the heat of battle has to let one fly.

1)    He/she can do the old “bun-squeeze” and hope the urge passes (as opposed to the gas!) but this is uncomfortable and undoubtedly bad for one’s colonic health;

2)    If its at a non-crucial part of the operation he/she can walk over to the corner for a few minutes, perhaps under the guise of needing to review the imaging studies on the computer screen. That way the evil gasses are deposited at least at some distance from the center of the action;

3)    He/she can let it fly and pretend nothing happened;

4)    He/she can let it fly and blame it on a nurse or resident doctor, or maybe the “gas-passer” (i.e. the anesthetist);

5)    He/she can let it fly but take full responsibility either before or after the event.

I have personally always opted for option #5 and I consistently make sure to announce the eruption before it happens. I feel this is the most courteous and morally desirable course of action because it not only represents honest and open disclosure of what is viewed by many as an unpleasant act, but it has the practical advantage of allowing certain people to take evasive action –the circulating nurse, anesthetist, and on-lookers. The scrub nurse and my surgical assistants are pretty well locked in and must tough it out and face the music (even if it’s a silent one).

Overall, though, this course of action would seem to satisfy Kantian ethics by doing what is clearly the right thing irrespective of outcome. And it seems to be aligned with Utilitarian ethical theory by producing the best outcome for the largest number of people. Finally, I don’t know exactly how Rawls would view this analysis but I think he would be satisfied.

It feels good to put my graduate training in bioethics to such important use.

We’re a small publication with only three editors, all of whom are currently scattered across the country/globe. At the moment there is only one of us handling most, if not all, of the magazine’s operations, from correspondance to the organization and tracking of submissions to event planning and social media stuff. As the IQ grows in both size and ambition, we’re more and more in need of someone to help us function on a day-to-day basis.

Responsibilities will definitely include: Correspondence (helping us make sure all queries/emails are answered and that all submissions recieved are acknowledged and personally responded to), organization and tracking of individual submissions, helping us maintain our social media presence and email list, and assisting with the planning, organization and promotion of events.

We may also need your help from time with basic web stuff such as site maintenance and content uploading, as well as helping us proofread each issue before it goes out into the world.

Assistants will also, if they wish, be included in discussions and decisions about possible new themes, directions and features for the magazine. This is a chance to not only gain experience in publishing, but to become directly involved in the development of one of Canada’s most interesting and innovative young literary magazines.

We are not gonna lie: This is a job that will, at times, be a little boring and tedious-feeling. There will be a lot of answering of emails, a lot of making of spreadsheets. But it will also, at other times, be a job that is extremely fun, creative, exciting and rewarding. We can say this with some confidence, as we’ve been doing it ourselves for over a year. It is also a job you can do from the comfort of your own home. We will never ask you to get coffee or go to the post office, the hours we will ask you to put in will be very few compared to most intern- or assistanceships, and every time we see you in real life we will give you hugs and beer.

Hours will be roughly 2-4 a week in the months when we are not actually putting out an issue, and 5-10 a week when we are. Pay is (extremely) modest, but it exists.

Our ideal candidate is Toronto or Montreal-based (though we will accept submissions from anywhere in Canada), with some kind of literary or publishing background. Applicants should be organized, enthusiastic, and really really good at replying promptly to emails. Previous experience is helpful but by no means required – it only matters that you can demonstrate that you’ve got the skills and enthusiasm we’re looking for.

Please have a look through our mandate and editorial policies before you send us your resume.

Applicants should send a resume, a brief cover letter and their contact information to incongruousquarterly@gmail.com. Please be sure to include your full name and “Editorial Assistant Application” in the subject heading.

Thanks so much, and good luck!

Love,

IQ

The deadline for submissions is November 13^th, 2011.

Poems, fiction and art can be considered “unpublishable” for reasons like content, length, form and subject matter. But what about work that cannot be published in a print magazine? Where does it fit, and how?

We are seeking literary and artistic work that takes into account, and advantage of, the fact that we are an online publication rather than a printed one.

We’re interested in figuring out what we can offer our contributors and readers that a print publication might not be able to. We are not bound by concerns of page or word count; we can feature audio and video files, hyperlinks, any kind of image, downloadable files, interactive or collaborative works, as well as our usual, more basic format of simple text or image on a page. We love work that explores, exploits or messes with different media and the boundaries between them is awesome; work that doesn’t do any of that stuff (more “traditional” stories and poems) but is concerned with the same ideas or themes we’re interested in (innovation, communication, connection, alienation, etc.) is great too.

Above all, we are looking to learn things. Surprise us. Challenge us. Show us something new.

Fiction submissions should be sent to incongruousfiction@gmail.com
Poetry submissions should be sent to incongruouspoetry@gmail.com
Submissions of art, or queries of any kind, should be sent to incongruousquarterly@gmail.com

Love,

IQ

www.incongruousquarterly.com/submissions

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f99PcP0aFNE